Sheer terror.

Sunday 7 February 2010

Am I allowed to admit to sheer, stomach-dropping-out-of-shoes terror? Or does that ruin my street cred? (Wait: I had street cred?) All I’ll admit to, in that case, is brain malfunction after overuse. Yes, that will suffice.

I finish finished the work in progress today. As in, the excuses are gone, the baby is done. Past due to my overly obsessive brain, but there we go. DONE. It even has a title — even though I think it will forever be known in my subconscious by its WiP title. As in, you refer to your friend as Ellie all the time, then someone calls her Elizabeth and you’re reaction is stunned recognition: Oh, right, that is your whole name, isn’t it? Huh. Just like this title. The proper name of a much more casually nicknamed intimate friend.

My brain also hurts from query editing and rewriting. Holy goats. I haven’t had an assignment so vigorously demanding of my mental faculties since my thesis. Condensing tens of thousands of sweat-and-tears words to… two hundred? Less? This isn’t the first hack I’ve taken to this same letter (as it should be) and I’m liking this latest iteration. By golly, I’ll get it perfect. (Or, well, considering my standards, close enough to do its job. Right? That’s the point. The query isn’t the end, it’s the beginning.)

Speaking of beginnings, I’m going to admit to that terror after all. I’m about to jump off the cliff and query. Let’s hope I can fly.

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On the topic of celiac disease…

Wednesday 3 February 2010

I have celiac disease. I’ve mentioned it before, here and there, but I’ve never wanted to take the time to talk about it because I considered it something that falls into the category of “personal,” and I don’t talk in detail about my personal life on this blog. I keep thinking about it of late, though, so in this case, I’ll make an exception.

Celiac disease is very common — it’s estimated 1 in 100 people have it — but celiac is also under-diagnosed or mis-diagnosed easily because of its wide array of potential symptoms (or even lack thereof). I came across this article the other day, which got me thinking about the nature of celiac disease and my particular experience with it. The basic part is that I’m living with celiac and it’s not an issue. Am I sad I can’t eat bread? No. Am I sad I can’t eat pasta? I actually love the texture of rice, potato, and corn pastas, especially this rice spaghetti with spinach I found. Delicious. Despite that, do I wish I didn’t have to deal with it? Yes, actually, I wish I didn’t have to deal with it. But I have it, so I deal with it. It’s as simple as that.

I was diagnosed in May 2009 the week after returning from my honeymoon. That was after almost six months of actively seeking an answer from my primary care physician and the gastroenterologist she sent me to see. My discussion with my primary care physician was an off-handed comment made to her in October, when I was in the office suffering from a sinus infection. “I’ve been having some discomfort,” I finally told her. My now-husband, then-fiancé had effectively badgered me into mentioning it to her after nine months of self-medicated lazy solutions that yielded no discernable results and changes in the way I felt.

“For how long?”

“Um. Well, I first noticed it once I moved to New York, after college. So, ah, late 2007, early 2008 maybe. But I assumed it had something to do with my change in diet and lifestyle — the college to grown-up transition. But even in college, I ate healthy foods, worked out regularly. So my routine isn’t that drastically different.”

She talked to me about it. My primary care physician is a lovely, brilliant woman who will listen to my hypochondriac blathering and diagnose me in a snap. She’s a teaching doctor and her office is filled with med students and interns who I’ve witnessed taking notes and asking teacher/student questions while I’m in the room. It’s hilarious. This also means that the questions my doctor asks are ones I never expect and they always seem to lead her directly to the exact answer. Teachers. She said, “You know? I bet it’s IBS. It usually is in a young woman. But I’ve got a friend and he’ll know for sure. I’ll refer you.”

So I went to see her gastroenterologist friend — another teaching doctor affiliated with the same medical school (at NYU). The gastroenterologist ran some tests, did the basic exam, and frowned. My symptoms were not nail-on-the-head anything. “It could be IBS. It probably is.” He frowned, running down the list of notes he’d sketched during my exam. “But maybe not. Let’s monitor this.” He gave me a few over-the-counter treatment options to use regularly for a few weeks. “If that doesn’t work, it will rule a few things out. Call me and make another appointment if that happens.” Naturally, I called and made an appointment four or five weeks later (again, prompted by my over-protective man; I was content to keep complaining and self-medicating). By now, it was February 2009. When my gastroenterologist said that he wanted to take a closer look and run some more complicated tests, I scheduled them for after the wedding, in mid-March. I was too busy to worry about how I was feeling with the wedding to plan.

At the post-wedding appointment in mid-March, I was examined like Katie Couric was, famously, on The Today Show a few years ago. I got to watch myself get examined on a TV screen and I felt kind of ridiculous. I’m too young for this, I kept thinking. But my teaching doctor gastroenterologist lectured me as he examined, and I got to learn far more about the colon than I’d ever known before. The biology geek in me who had once entertained the idea of med school sat there fascinated while the hysterical hypochondriac in me was silently hyperventilating. At the end of that, I was told my colon was filled with very healthy tissue and I most certainly did not have colon cancer. Oh, gee, I thought, colon cancer had been on the table? Really?

I couldn’t schedule a follow-up until May — the office is always booked — and honestly after that, I needed a few weeks’ respite from the gastroenterologist’s office. So it wasn’t colon cancer. It was, as my primary care physician had said months ago, probably just IBS. So I had them draw enough blood to supply an army of vampires for the full battery of tests and made the next appointment.

I didn’t get back in to see the results of the March test until May. My gastroenterologist sat down with me on the Tuesday after I’d returned from our all-you-can-eat Royal Caribbean honeymoon vacation. I was feeling horrible, but I only vaguely mentioned that. He pointed to numbers on my chart, ones that came back with my very complicated blood work he’d sent off the last time I was in the office. “Your numbers say you may have celiac disease,” he said.

I stared at him. Celiac disease, I thought. Like what Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View has. (No really: that was my first association.) “Oh,” I said aloud. “Really.” My brain didn’t actually process this. My mouth just worked.

“Yes,” he said. My gastroenterologist is a brilliant, scholarly doctor — a teaching doctor. He always speaks in a combination of lecture-speak and an “I assume you already know X and Y, so I’ll begin with Z so we don’t waste time,” kind of manner. He said, “But we can’t know for certain unless we go in and have a look.” Oh, did I know about the going-in-and-having-a-look preference of my teaching doctor doctor. Not that I disagreed — I was an obsessive devotee of ER reruns on TNT for years, so I understood why — but I think in that moment my brain was grappling to find some levity. Not that I was panicking. I just wasn’t actually processing the data correctly. Agreeing with the good doctor was just easier. “I think it’s essential we find out for certain as soon as possible because if this is the cause, there is an easy way for you to start feeling better immediately. How’s tomorrow?” I booked the procedure for the next morning.

I called the requisite worried family members, who by now were all apprised of my quest for an answer, and they were as interested by my half diagnosis as I was. They wished me well and admitted they hoped I didn’t have it. I wasn’t so certain by that point. That night, I hit the internet. All I’d ever known about celiac disease before then had been approximately as much as I knew about, say, pneumonia or kidney stones. I knew what it was, theoretically what the causes and symptoms were, and what it meant for me only in the vaguest of terms. The internet — as you can go look if you Google “celiac disease” provided an inordinate amount of information. But I didn’t look at it too seriously. It was only a half-diagnosis, after all.

The next day, the husband came with — I needed to be sedated, so by law I needed to be escorted from the office; I felt very special. The moment I entered the examination room, the doctor began explaining by saying, “You’ll know it’s celiac the moment you wake up from the sedation because I’ll know the moment I’m in there. Have a seat.”

The thing about having a teaching doctor, I’ve realized, is if you remind them enough of one of their students, they tend to treat you like a student rather than a patient. That was how I’d felt all along — as if rather than reassuring me the patient, he was teaching me the student. It’s comforting for someone who’s spent more of her life as a student than not.

They sedated me. (Which, by the way, is so incredibly freaky. Falling asleep without the falling part, just the sleeping.) The next time I blinked, I looked around the room to see everyone cleaning up. “You have celiac,” the doctor announced. He seemed pleased, as if he’d found the missing piece of that 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle tucked under the sofa. “I’m so happy because it’s so treatable. You’ll start seeing a change immediately.”

He sat with the husband and I and explained in the most basic terms what celiac was — which I already knew — and what that had meant for my small intestine. He even showed me images he’d printed of my small intestine and the deteriorative damage it had suffered due to my ingesting gluten. (Those images worked like the images of the cancerous lungs they show to kids to keep them from smoking. Holy goats, I didn’t want anything to do with gluten after that.) My specific (and unusual) set of symptoms was what led to the confusion regarding my lengthy diagnosis process. He said roughly 2% of people with celiac exhibit the symptoms I had, which was why it took them so long to rule out other things and pin this one down. The husband, my man whose favorite foods involve pretzels, brioche rolls, Italian hoagies, and fascinating pizzas, was a little horrified. No more wheat, rye, or barley? But that meant no more beer! I smiled in his direction. The marriage was two months old and this was the first big test. How would he handle it? (Remarkably generously, as it turned out.)

I, meanwhile, sat there in the gastroenterologist’s office, blinking as my brain processed this. “I’ve always preferred a salad to a sandwich,” I said. “I like fruit. I hate cupcakes.”

I found I used that explanation a lot over the next days and weeks. People came up to me and gave me their condolences about my “disease” and how they were so sad I wouldn’t be able to eat bread ever again. The older the person, the stranger and more sympathetically depressing the reaction. It was as if I’d told them I’d been diagnosed with one of those life-threatening illnesses with a 98% survival rate. They approached me with a sympathetic apology and overwhelming good cheer half the time. Even my lady doctor startled when I told him. “Oh, really? I’m so sorry. That’s so unfortunate.” I had to resist the urge to snap, “No one has died! Stop grieving over the loss of my intestine’s ability to endure the presence of the gluten protein!” Instead, I said lightly, “I’ve always liked salads.”

The biggest thing for me over the past nine months hasn’t been coping with the loss of foods I can’t eat. When I said I wasn’t a big sandwich person, I meant it. I love sushi and Thai (hold the soy sauce unless it’s gluten-free, though) and I really do love salads. What gets to me is the prevalence of wheat-based foods. The nutritionist I consulted summed it up perfectly: America is a wheat-based society. Whereas China, India, and Japan (and other nations) are largely rice-based societies, Americans go to wheat (and to a lesser extent, corn, which I can eat) for everything. That means wheat products and flour made from wheat are cheap. Thus, wheat flour is often the go-to flour in pretty much every sense in this country. (Wikipedia says, “In the culinary sense, flour is a powder made of cereal grains, other seeds, or roots.” Flour is often synonymous in our culture with “wheat flour,” wherein lies most people’s confusion.) Flour doesn’t only have to come from wheat, though. You can find flours made from rice, corn, bean, quinoa, arrowroot, tapioca and a ton of variations of other starches. But if a recipe of something as innocuous as gravy calls for flour, the chef is going to add wheat flour. It’s just how things go. (There’s also the gluten protein itself, which has some fascinating culinary science applications — i.e. it’s the gluten that gives New York pizza crust its doughy, throw-able springy texture — but that’s another story for a culinary-science-inspired entry.)

In some senses, it’s also hard because I grew up being able to eat gluten, so I am conscious of what I’m missing. If I have a craving for a Pepperidge Farm Milano cookie (which is, cough, distinctive), or an Oreo, I can’t eat it. I’m a texture person, rather than a taste person, so it’s the smooth softness of a classic Madeleine cookie I miss, the chewy crustiness of good New York pizza crust, the bready, soft New York bagel. (Okay, living in New York, home of the best bread in America, doesn’t help, although to its credit, New York is also an amazingly celiac-friendly city.) But it’s not debilitating. I feel bad when I can’t eat food someone has made for a potluck. I hate having to explain the fact that I can’t eat certain things to confused waiters in loud restaurants when I ask if a certain dish has any hidden flour in it (and yes, I take a risk when going to restaurants, but I’m not so affected I can’t trust the kitchens of my neighborhood haunts). Most restaurants in New York I’ve encountered are surprisingly accommodating, friendly, and the waiters are actually knowledgeable. I’ve been told tableside whether or not certain sauces contain flour by waiters who tell me they get the question more often than I’d probably expect. It makes it easier to deal with when I don’t feel so alone, when I have friends who are willing to accommodate me and others who shrug and say, “I’m not a big pasta person anyway.”

Having celiac isn’t like having a peanut allergy, it’s not like being allergic to bell peppers. I’ve explained it to very small children by calling it an allergy — that’s a keyword they know from the cradle, apparently — though when asked to elaborate I do admit it’s “like” an allergy, but it’s not really one. At restaurants I used to say I couldn’t eat bread, which led waiters to look at me as if I was some Atkins Diet fanatic. I quickly turned that into “I’m allergic to wheat,” which is now basically, “I can’t eat wheat, rye, or barley.” (That seems to be easiest at restaurants, rather than having to explain the definition of celiac to a stranger.) For practical purposes, it’s more like being vegetarian or vegan, though with an identifiable medical effect if I “cheat.” And like vegetarianism or veganism, it is,  in my experience, generally recognized. Out of the hundreds of people I’ve had to explain my condition to, only one has actually frowned and said, “I’ve never heard of that.” The overwhelming response of late is, “Really? I know someone with celiac.” When I hear that, I smile.

One in a hundred, I keep thinking. It’s not so bad, as “conditions” go. It’s forced the husband and I to cook more, get more creative, become newly addicted to Food Network. I’ve perfected a fantastic gluten-free scone recipe. (Cranberry walnut is the current favorite variety.) Maybe one day I’ll perfect a gluten-free imitation Milano or Oreo recipe. Sigh. I’ll keep working on it.

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Finished?!

Tuesday 26 January 2010

It’s a term that’s always relative, isn’t it? Being “finished” with something — especially for writers. How finished is finished? Even now, a week after I wrote (rewrote?) the final chapter in my Work in Progress, I’m reluctant to say I’m finished. In one definitional sense I am, but in others, I’m still working.

Since I “finished,” I’ve been cycling back through chapter by chapter, smoothing continuity issues (my new ending necessitated some tweaking at certain points). Also, based on my current word count (about 5,000 above my desired point, but still no where near “danger” territory) I’ve been looking to cut scenes, unnecessary words and phrases, and redundancy. Thankfully, the slicing has been going well and mercilessly. I will miss a lot but I’m not too concerned about that at this point. After my betas read it, I’ll go through again (hastily! Speedily! Remarkably quickly!) and… well. At that point Things Will Happen. Yes, indeed.

It’s been hard to want to tear myself away from working to even think about blogging. (I apologize for the gap here!) I’ve tried to supplement with occasional Twitter comments, but I even forget to update  (and check) Twitter — and Twitter is Twitter. Even when I stare at the WiP (which is still “in progress” as far as I’m concerned for now) and I don’t want to work on/in it, I still do something else involving writing. I write notes for future projects, I fiddle around with reference documents, I read or re-read something else. I’m no longer in the habit to blog. (Bad Erin!) Then, when I’m not working, I’m catching up on all of the other life essentials I consistently neglect, which is hardly different from anyone else who gets sucked into their work.

(One of said life essentials is now appeasing my husband by watching one episode of Battlestar Galactica a night. His preference would probably be a non-stop marathon, but we’ve compromised. Neither of us has seen BSG and considering I regularly quote Star Wars and we are both unrepentant geeks, watching BSG is one of those “It’s about darned time!” experiences we can no longer avoid. We’re still early in Season One [be dears and don't spoil anything!] and already Starbuck has filled a bit more of the complex, ass-kicking female character void in my soul. That, and where has Tricia Helfer been all of my life?! I am straight and married — but damn.)

The next steps are to finish my last scan of the document, pass it on to the next sets of eyes, then start the business end of things. This isn’t my first novel by any stretch, but it’s the first one I’m going to query. I’m both excited and terrified about that. Now that I have the entirety of the story written (…and tentative sequels mapped? AH!) I am looking forward to 2010 with a bit more enthusiasm and fervor than I did a month ago.

Good things are going to happen. My cheeky optimism says so.

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Two days

Tuesday 29 December 2009

I won’t make my deadline. (The deadline finish the WiP by January 1st.) I’ve known this for a while now and I’ve made my peace with it. The husband, too. He chuckled and said, “It was fictitious. You know you’re on a deadline, but I’m trying to remind you that the deadline isn’t ‘in the future’, it’s now.” It’s true. The fire under the butt has been lit for some time and it’s also true that I’ve made some serious progress so far this month. (That, and I devoured First Lord’s Fury by Jim Butcher over a 2 day span last week. Oh, the Codex Alera, how I love it so.) Considering November was swallowed by the Black Hole of NaNoWriMo, I am pleased that I was able to hop back into this (very different!) story and get it in snapping shape. The NaNo draft helped me amp up this one, I think, by comparison. They’re such different stories and getting back into my narrator’s head this month after being third person all over the place last month helped reassert the importance of voice, diction, and character in first person.

This month the husband (why am I calling him that now? Has he outgrown ‘the boy’?) read the entire draft in its new and happily rewritten form and he made a whole bunch of suggestions. (The first being, once he got up as far as it’s written, the comment, “Why isn’t it DONE yet?! GAHHHH!” Oh, a familiar sentiment from the Alpha Readers. [I shall call you that, ladies!]) He’s easily caught up on logical errors and always wants everything to be “Epic!” and so if a supposed action sequence dribbles on the page, he’ll call me on it. “I expected EPIC, Erin, EPIC!” Of course, I am not writing Epic Fantasy (let’s remember that is its own genre) and he knows that, but his sentiment is rather universal. Dribbling scenes are no fun for anyone.

In non-writing news, the holidays have been fun. We did Hanukkah (all eight nights of candles and presents!) and Christmas, and of course the husband’s birthday fell between the two so it was more or less non stop presents and such. We got him a PlayStation 3 (us, really) for the birthday, as well as a fun assortment of toys related to it (oh, BluRay!). I also made him a scrapbook, my first foray into the world of scrapbooking. (I cheated; I used a kit and a bunch of pre-made stickers. Is that cheating? I know people get intense about scrapbooks.) I thematically designed it around our “love” (cough, or relationship), starting with hilarious photos from 2004, through our backpacking venture in 2007, leading to the wedding and honeymoon. It was one of those sugary-cutesy things I’m only really inclined to do every few years, though the look on Bryan’s face was absolutely worth it. (If cutesy-artsy things didn’t take me forever to do — perfectionism! — I’d do them more often. The girlie 12 year old part of me enjoys it immensely. [My inner 12 year old is always the loudest of the inner children. My inner 8 year old wanted a Lego kit for Christmas -- either a Star Wars one or a castle/knights one -- and I think she's still upset about not getting one again.])

Hm. I keep making parenthetical observations in parentheses. Are there parenthetical commentary abusers anonymous meetings? Or messageboards?

Oh. Day after Christmas, we found FernGully at Target for $5. After seeing Avatar the weekend before Christmas (which was AMAZING!!!!), I realized I really needed to own a DVD version of that movie. (My 8 year old inner self was reasonably appeased by this purchase.) I sat and watched it that night with rapt attention. I’m not ashamed at all. I was Crysta for Halloween one year and had a three-year (minimum!) obsession with fairies. These are the things that (all added together) led me to writing fantasy in the first place. Kind of fascinates me, in a way, backtracking through my years of obsessions and how they’ve all influenced me. (Lock me up before I start self-psychoanalyzing all of that.)

The Christmas tree is still alive. (Fraser fir is the way to go, folks!) We’re going to take its lights and ornaments off after New Year’s and cart it to our local park where it will be recycled into mulch for the spring. (Yay recycling!) The day after Christmas I started pulling out all the decor boxes, to pack it all up, and the husband (this is his first Christmas tree) refused to let me. “Not yet!” Oh, Christmas is magic, isn’t it?

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Obligatory progress report

Tuesday 8 December 2009

The writing deadline I’ve set for myself (or rather my husband guilted me into setting) is looming ever closer and I’m working on reaching it. I’m not sure at this point what the WiP will look like at that point, though.

For the past few days I have been going painstakingly line by line over a printout of my WiP and making edits and pages of notes. There is something fundamentally different between scrolling with the click wheel down a page of text in the Word Processor versus sitting over it with a colored pen with proofreader’s marks. (For the most part I do use the formal notations but I have developed my own system after years of editing papers and stories.) It’s laboriously slow but the result has somewhat startled me. I’ve hacked and slashed a bunch of lines here and there, lines I’d skip over when scrolling because I “liked” them or because I remembered so vividly the day I wrote them. But now that they’re printed in front of me, they’ve been cut. It’s quite fun, being merciless! (Especially because I know I’ve saved a version of this, so the words will never be gone “forever”.)

I am starting to get impatient with finishing this. I feel like that’s a good sign. I keep daydreaming about scenes in it, too. Staring off into space at the gym on the elliptical, I sort of ignored my podcast and thought instead of my plot. Going through this draft like this has shown me its nitpicky errors but also its really lovely moments. I really love this story. It geeks me out, almost. It’s also the first entirely new story I’ve written since college. (The other drafts I’ve been cycling through either started in college or started before college.) This one I started this last January and it’s been purely a project of 2009. Part of me wants to bookend it thusly and just get it done before the new year. But the other part of me, the practical one, looks at my work schedule and thinks it can’t really be done. The husband even said to me yesterday, “Think of this deadline as a fictitious deadline. Because really, that’s all it is. It’s in our heads. There’s no real external pressure on you.” But that’s just it. Internal pressure is pretty darned effective too. I feel it weighing on me every day now. I’ve worked on four different drafts this year. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of brand new words in 2009. It’s time I finished this one and got on to the next. Boom, boom, done. Yes. (If I write it here, I will do it, I know it!)

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And NaNoWriMo is over.

Tuesday 1 December 2009

I won NaNoWriMo 2009! Now all I need to do is get my winner’s t-shirt (or another, at least) and sit back, giggling over the ludicrousness of my accomplishment. Right?

Well, not really. I’ll explain.

The breakneck pace of my NaNoWriMo project this year was due in part to a lot of factors. It was a story I first wrote, in a version absurdly different from the way I see it now, back in 2000/2001. I’ve rewritten it top-to-bottom at least three times now, and in each version markedly different things happen but it’s the same world, same basic story. The three main characters are always the same three folks. I know them absurdly well. I even transposed their odd story onto a screenplay I wrote in college, for no other reason than I couldn’t think of what else to write for my assignment and these characters are old friends. But back in 2007 I imagined a vastly different background for the characters which gives a different gravity, a weight to the story that was never there. But I never wrote more than a vague scene and some notes on this new direction. I realized that this change was so big I had to delete certain characters I’d known for a draft or two, create entirely new ones, re-imagine old ones, and utterly alter the nature of the plot’s movement. (And that was scary and a huge thing to just… start one day!) My ideas for this draft were the same but the events leading to them were different, things like that. I was afraid to actually write it at last, I think. But I needed a project for NaNo and I think NaNo is the perfect opportunity for a writer to just take something off of their already large to-do list and just do it (as opposed to the way a non-writer approaches NaNo).

So I approached this year’s NaNoWriMo as my excuse to finally write this idea down, as I said a few weeks ago here. That helped my ability to punch this story out in 20 days, certainly, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t pretty much flying by the seat of my pants every day all the same. I also devoted a good 8, sometimes 10 hours a day to the endeavor, and had a lot of output as a result of the time I put into it. (And no, my fingers can’t fly over keys for all of those hours straight. I am easily distracted.) Some fascinating things happened. I was confident in my point of view and its changes. (Point of view is usually my hardest single choice in a draft! I agonize! Not so in this one.) I seamlessly slid into the persona of these old, beloved characters, even though I threw things at them I didn’t even know I’d hidden up my subconscious sleeve. It was glorious fun.

But now that I’ve done all of that, finally written down the meat of the story (and I’ve outlined what the rest of the story will be) I am looking at December quite differently than I looked at October and November. I’m realizing that while I can probably sit and finish my NaNo novel and make it what I know it will be now, I also have an obligation to myself to finish my 2009 WiP, the very same one I started during my self-imposed JaNoWriMo last January, the one I’ve been working on in earnest rewriting and polishing since the summer. I’ve made the [rash?] promise to myself that by 2010, I will finish it. Which means… 31 days from now. It’s only about 20 or 25,000 words away from completion. That’s half of NaNoWriMo’s sheer output demand. Theoretically as I wrote 50,000 words in 20 days, this 20,000 word chunk should be… well. Shouldn’t be too onerous for a 31 day task.

Now that is a hell of a lot scarier to me than NaNoWriMo. My WiP is a rewrite. Granted, I’ve diverged [at times majorly] from my first draft in this rewrite, but I still know where I’m going and [pretty much] how I’ll get there. (Rather, I know the major things I need to hit and where it will end, but the details are foggy. I am a write-to-know details person.) But finishing denotes… finality. I think I need to do it to prove to myself that I can wrap this thing up tight. Then, once I’m content with that, I’ll go back to this year’s NaNo, revisit my other drafts set in that same world… oh, the many things I must do. Oh, yes, and begin the query process. For the first time ever. The funny thing is I’m not nervous about querying so much as nervous about what happens when (“when” because, recall, I am cheekily optimistic) it all happens. When this amorphous agent wants me as a client, when they sell my book to a publisher…. I’m nervous about being a real grown up. Not about being a writer — I’ve been a writer since I was twelve, for goodness’ sake; I have a degree in writing! — but about being a real freaking grown up. I am too old to be nervous about that! But… still. Part of me wants to go tell my story to my Barbies and call it a day, like I did when I was twelve. But I’m too old for that, too.

Oh, December… how exciting you shall be…

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